IMshopping

IMshopping was launched in April 2009. IMshopping is the first of its kind human-assisted shopping site. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, IMshopping service is the digital equivalent of talking to a knowledgeable salesperson at a store. The site specializes in enabling online shoppers to get answers to specific technical and qualitative questions with reference to products and services.

AbOUT the company

Founding

Prashant Nedungadi is the CEO and founder of IMshopping, he had previously co-founded Andale, the largest third-party tool provider on eBay. Nedungadi later merged Andale with Vendio, one of the leading small business e-commerce players.

Investors

IMshopping’s primary investor is SK Telecom, a South Korean mobile telecommunications operator. The company recently announced that it had closed a $4.7 million Series A round of funding from SK Telecom.

Functioning and methodology

Shoppers need to register with the IMshopping site to ask questions with regards to the products or services they are looking for.Once the question is keyed, it is routed to Human Shopping Guides who offer their researched suggestions(reviews from third-party sites, blog buzz and pricing) with links to selected product options that fit the requirements of the user within a short period of time. Shoppers can use these responses to instantly make purchases or save to their own folders before making a product decision.

Additional features

The site allows online shoppers to ask questions using social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter.

The responses to the shoppers by the human shopping guides are also archived anonymously by the website for the reference of future shoppers. The site is user interactive and it allows the user to answer the questions posted by others.